Teenreads.com -- THE NIGHT TOURIST by Katherine Marsh

THE NIGHT TOURIST
Katherine Marsh
Hyperion Books for Children
Fantasy
Hardcover: 9781423106890
Paperback: 9781423106906
256 pages

Since the death of his mother, Anastasia, 14-year-old Jack Perdu has led a lonely, mostly friendless life. Living with his bereaved father on Yale University's campus, Jack's main joy is translating Latin --- specifically, helping a Classics professor develop a new translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the classic myths of love and transformation. Little does Jack know, though, just how much these myths --- especially the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice --- will come to mean in his own life.

Jack's life, in fact, almost comes to a horrible end in the very first chapter, when a car accident sends him to the hospital. Confused by the odd behavior of his father in the wake of the accident, as well as by his own ability to see things that might not be real, Jack is thoroughly perplexed when his father sends him to see a specialist physician --- in New York City. Since the accidental death of Jack's mother, neither Jack nor his father has set foot in the city they used to call home. Now, though, Jack is on a train to Grand Central Terminal.

There, after a bewilderingly brief visit with his specialist, Jack meets a mysterious girl named Euri. She offers to show him the New York that only "real urban explorers" see, giving him a behind-the-scenes tour of Grand Central that leads him right into a place even most New Yorkers don't know about --- the New York Underworld. Euri herself is dead, and she leads Jack into a world where a ferryman in a Circle Line t-shirt collects fares to cross the river, a three-headed dog patrols the streets and a real Dead Poets' Society boasts members like Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginsberg. Might Jack be able to find his mother in the Underworld? And can he help Euri overcome a mistake she made years before?

Katherine Marsh's debut novel, THE NIGHT TOURIST, cleverly (although occasionally clumsily) merges two recent trends in children's fiction --- the convergence of myths with contemporary life (as in Rick Riordan's phenomenally successful Percy Jackson series) and the exploration of a world under New York City (as in Kirsten Miller's Kiki Strike series and Suzanne Collins’s Underland Chronicles). The book is strongest during its descriptions of Jack's nightly trips through New York, led by his competent tour guide Euri. In these passages, Marsh's own knowledge of and affection for Manhattan shine through.

Marsh also competently incorporates the elements of Ovid (and other Greek mythology) into this modern-day tale while still developing her own unique mythology of New York's Underworld. Of course, readers already familiar with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice will have a pretty good idea of how the novel will wind up. Some loose ends are not so neatly tied up, though, leaving readers hoping for a sequel and another glimpse into whether or not Jack can find hope and comfort among the living as well as he does among the dead.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

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